Playing aeroplane in an airplane: tick.

We bit the bullet, bought the tickets, took the six hour flight, and spent a week in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, sitting by a pool, scuba-diving, and eating, eating, eating.

“Five-month olds on a plane? On a six hour flight?  Are you insane?”

“Probably,” is my answer.

Five-month olds on a plane.

The flight there, where we had to check-in at 5am, was fine and the girls slept a lot (on the seat and on us), were a bit fussy, but did not cry, not really, not once.  “This is a piece of cake,” I thought to myself.  “There will be no problems on the way back.”

4am. Glasgow Airport. Revere the sling, for the sling brings silence and peace.

Check-in for the return flight was at 4pm.  “The girls will sleep,” I thought to myself, “and all will be fine. They were angels on the way here and there is no reason they will not be angels on the way back.”

Babies aren’t as predictable as all that.

Accomplished floor sleepers, the girls were having none of it on either flight -- hence the empty blanket beneath the chair.

There was no sleeping, and so there were a lot of tears.  There were four or five women who desperately wanted to help us out and play with the girls, but the girls have begun making strange and this includes increased decibel levels in the crying department, so no relief there.  Still, the flight did eventually end, and with only one smelly diaper during the flight…which I didn’t have to change (hurrah!).

And then there was the drive home to Aberdeen.

Newbie parents that we are, we naively believed that since we were arriving back in Glasgow at 8pm (an hour past the girls’ usual going to bed time), the girls would simply crash and sleep the three hour drive to Aberdeen, so no need to spend the night in a hotel.

I used the word naively in the previous paragraph, so you must know where this is going.  Little girls who haven’t slept on the flight aren’t necessarily going to sleep in their car seats even when the car is doing 80 mph and it is well past their bedtime. *sigh*   Much screaming led to a quick exit off the motorway onto a dark side-road, which led to much nursing and a few choice words between the parents.  Finally, said girls grudgingly crashed and didn’t wake until two minutes from our flat in Aberdeen.  Oh, and all of this was done in a snowstorm.  Needless to say, next time we’ll be renting that hotel room.

Would I do it again?  Yes.  Unfortunately, I’ll have two crawling eight-month olds to contend with on the next flight, so keep your eye out for that post.

 

Babies’ first bath. 13 January, 2011. Yep, more than a month after they were born.

So, I decided to wait until Mom arrived before giving the girls their first bath.  I figured that a) Mom, living so far away from them, would enjoy having that honour, and b) they never had a bath while in the neonatal unit so it probably wasn’t a big deal — right?  And, if I’m honest, I was a wee bit hesitant about the whole thing.  I mean,  I could have done it myself and I would have been fine, but why risk scalded and drowndeded* babies if you don’t have to?  Also, why not share the screaming?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In all honesty, the water was probably a bit on the cool side.  The second and third baths went much better with no screaming on Freya’s part and very little screaming by Daracha.  We’ll make water babies out of them yet!

*Yes, grammar police: I know it’s not a real word.  I’m using it anyway.

 

Good-bye, Bombay Saphire. I have a new love.

An independent whiskey shop opened its doors on Union Street the other month. One evening, as we were walking by, hubby dragged me in, “just for a look”. “Fine,” I said, “but you’ll owe me.” (I said this because whiskey doesn’t taste good and looking at whiskey is so. very. boring.) And then I saw the wall of gin. Yes. The wall of gin. And then the kind whiskey shop owner let me taste some of the different gins. And then hubby became bored and wanted to leave the shop, but I didn’t find it boring any more and wanted to stay. Eventually, hubby won out and we had to leave. I went away with Sipsmith. Not only is the label pretty (and a bit freaky if I’m honest), but the gin is very yummy, with its hints of lemon. So yummy that I’ve become a gin drinker again. Yay! No more boring, cold nights for me, and I’ll be up to the gills in quinine so will be unlikely to contract malaria. I win twice.

 

My Grandmother’s Dress

I don’t know the story behind this dress.  I just know that it was my Grandmother’s.  I don’t know when she made it.  I think she made it for herself sometime in the ’50s, or maybe the early ’60s.   What I do know is that I’ve been waiting for the proper occasion to wear it since she passed it on to me eight-or-so years ago.   And then, hallelujah and glory-be, our Christmas Ceroc evening was 1950s themed!  And the dress fit!!  (Yep,  I’m a Lawrence.)

I got to dance the night away in my Grandmother’s beautiful party dress.

Proper dancing, too.  With lots of twirling.

And I used a curling iron for the first time in about 10 years.  And bobby pins.  And hairspray.  But not 1950s, black-framed, cat-style glasses, sadly.  Just didn’t have those in my bag of tricks.  (Must make a note for myself to buy some for future forays.)

And what I loved about the whole thing the most?   Maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a daughter who will be wearing this dress at a party one day, and she can put pictures of her in the dress with the pictures of me, and the pictures of my grandmother.

[Note to relatives back home:  ask Grandma to dig pictures out, will you, please?]

 

FMGK #2

(facts my grandparents knew)

FMGK #2: Lowering a bucket by a rope into a well for water means that the bucket will float and no water will be had unless a rock in a bag or something else heavy is tied to the handle of the bucket so that the lip of the bucket tips and is dragged beneath the waterline.

(That’s right, folks, our water pipe has been frozen for just over a week.)

(FMGK #1)

 

FMGK

(facts my grandparents knew)

Every now and then I come across facts that would have been common knowledge when my grandparents or great-grandparents were young, but are no longer known because of the way (the) society (I live in) has changed, so I have begun a new category that will be added to as these pieces of information are discovered: FMGK.

FMGK #1: Don’t wrap your apple core in your cloth handkerchief, because the juice discolours the cloth and you will never get the stains out.  Ever.

…

…

“Um…Crystal, where are the other facts?”

Well…I don’t have any yet.  But as soon as I come across any more, I’ll be sure to add them.  In the mean-time, if you have a piece of re-discovered information, please do add it to the comments section.  Any I get, I’ll set out in a separate post.

 

And on the Sixth Day…

Umm…well…the sixth month…

Do you see it?

No?  Let me give you a closer look.

The chickens gave us EGGS!

Well, okay, it was one chicken and one egg.   We’re expecting another one tomorrow, though.  We know this because a second legbar is acting like the first one was today:  wandering around on its own, checking out small enclosed spaces.

“What’s that you said, Crystal?  A legbar laid today’s egg?”

“Why, yes.  It did.”

“So that means YOUR EGG IS BLUE!!”

And I answer, “YES IT IS!!!” (with three exclamation marks and one happy dance)

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?  Notice the upside down heart?

And here’s the egg all cleaned up and in some lower lighting so you really see the blue.  (I was going to hold it next to a white egg for contrast, but it seems we only have brown eggs in the house.)

“Wait.  What’s the material behind you, Crystal?  I don’t remember having seen it before.”

That’s because you haven’t seen it before, friends and family.  It’s new, having been purchased just yesterday as a heat-retaining strategy.

As you know, we keep looking for ways to keep the heat in our tin can house.  I’ve stapled fiberglass under our living room and bedroom, I’ve put old haybales under the caravan as a wind-break and to retain heat (…please don’t bring in mice, please don’t bring in mice, please don’t bring in mice…), I’ve had my dad buy and post shrink-wrap plastic for windows from Canada, since stores are no longer allowed to sell it over here in the UK.  [Note:  if any UK people know for a fact that I'm wrong about this, then please, please send me the name of the store that sells it, so that I no longer have to import the stuff.]  Today’s curtain is the final step and will help keep the heat in the kitchen and living room, rather than having it dissipate in the hall.  It took me four hours of hand-sewing and I now have a hole in my middle finger where the needle kept digging in, but it was so worth it.

 

No More Floor

I finished pulling up the floorboards in the croft-house last week, all except a narrow walkway along the middle length.

While pulling up the section of floor over what would have originally been the living room, I found that the underside of the boards were white-washed except where they were nailed onto the joists, meaning that the second story floor used to be the first story ceiling — in Canadian terms, that is.  In UK terms, the first story floor was the ground floor ceiling.  (That’s right.  Over here, the elevator buttons read: G, 1, 2, 3…  It makes no sense to me, but neither does the inside lane of a round-about being called the outside lane.  Caused a few fights between Graeme and me, that one did, during my driving lessons phase.)

I am really enjoying finding little quirks about the house that have been hidden for goodness knows how many years.  First there were the feedbags, and now the whitewash.  Another one is a wee fireplace on the South wall of the second story that was hidden behind these wall-boards (picture to come later).

What intrigues me about the underside of the floorboards, is that some of them were lined with newspaper and then nailed down.  Were some of the floorboards originally wall boards?  Why else would newspaper be glued to the board?  Why put all that work into something and then hide it? I’ll never know, I guess.  I do wish there was a date visible on the newsprint to help me with the timeline of the house, but no luck there.  An answer never did come back from the feed company about the likely date of the feedbags, so I keep hoping for something else that will help me nail things down in time.

 

 

Dunecht Estate

Every morning on the way to work Graeme and I drive past these:

We believed it to be the entrance to a private estate, but always saw a variety of cars parked in the lot in front of the gates.  This led us to wondering whether, in fact, we were wrong, so two weeks ago, Graeme and I parked our car amongst the others, walked through the gates, and were not struck down by lightening.  So we ventured a little further, and then a little further than that.  And we found this:

Which led us past neatly ploughed fields to:

To the right of which was:

After I had conquered my house envy by telling myself how much cleaning I would need to do to keep something like that tidy (but secretly vowing to begin playing the lottery), Graeme and I continued walking along the road, past a golf course (members from a specific cachement area only, and only if two other members have invited you to join), enjoying the Autumn colours,

acting silly,

And generally enjoying the fine day and the fine walk, where we saw labrador retrievers in training, a skidder doing skidder-type things, horses, ducks, swans and even a heron.  None of which you can see in this next picture.

 

Lost Moments

Oooo…this could go in so many different directions.  I can hear you thinking: is she going to walk down maudlin lane and write about no longer being close enough to home to share in those special family times like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Charlie’s new haircut? Or maybe she’s going to tell one of her funny I lost my wallet/purse/keys/your small child stories.

Well, you’re wrong.  (Except for Shawna…and Tanya.  I’m pretty sure they’ve guessed this one right)

This is all about my amazing ability to become lost in my own back yard even though I have a map and stop to look at it every five minutes when I’m driving somehwere moments.  And this moment, rather than leading me to a nice “woodland walk”, as promised by the brochure I had picked up (a brochure whose directions left much to be desired, I might add), meant that I found this:

This being Castle Drum.  It’s just a whole load of fairy-tale-awesome, isn’t it, my North American friends, whose young and upstart countries boast nothing like this.   No.  I’m sorry, but the Disney castle, Parliament Hill, and Casa Loma do not count.  Why?  Because they’re young – and the Disney castle is cheating, pure and simple.  (Make what you will of that statement!) Castle Drum, on the other hand, isn’t young.  The large, square tower you see is the oldest intact tower in Scotland and has been dated back to the 1200′s.  Also, it was home to one family for over 600 years.  (The history of the castle can be found here.)  It and another — not kidding — dozen-or-so castles are within a 40 minute drive of my house.  (In other words, there’ll be plenty more ‘lost moments’ like this one, I’m sure.)

And this, my friends, is Charlie:

Charlie